Review of the novel, "Island"

I just read the novel, "Island", by Aldous Huxley. This book came out in 1962 and tells the story of Pala, a mythical island where oil has recently been discovered. The protagonist of the story, Will Farnaby, is a British journalist and economic hitman who has been hired by corporate tycoons to negotiate with the island's royal elite for the right to extract the tiny country's oil wealth.

The job of the economic hitman is to bribe a country's leader to betray his people so that a western corporation can steal the nation's assets from them. Economic hitmen are very real and have been a major strategy of the United States to steal the wealth of the third world since Mossadegh--the democratically elected leader of Iran--was driven out of office by the CIA. For more read "Economic Hitman" by John Perkins.

During the course of his visit to Pala Will Farnaby entertains himself by taking a guided tour of the island and its remarkable culture. Pala is a utopia: its people are well-educated, well adjusted, superbly healthy in body and mind. It soon becomes obvious that Huxley's main purpose with the book is to wax on about his social theories for reasons that should be known to you, but sadly are probably not.

When one understands who Aldous Huxley is it should become clearer. Huxley was the son of T. H. Huxley, a British intellectual and member of The Royal Society. The entire Huxley family was active in British politics and policy and are, in fact, propagandists for the British empire. For example, Aldous' brother, Julian, was the first director of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promoting world education congenial to empire. Aldous' role was to write books that introduced key ideas (memes) into society so that when they were later proposed as policy they would not seem shocking, a phenomenon called "predictive programming".

For example, he spends a lot of time in the book describing the education of Palanese youth who are given training in the hard sciences, but also in physical and emotional health, and Buddhist spirituality. They are selected, based on their abilities and personality type, for special instruction. This may sound appealing but in the end what is revealed is education of children for the benefit of society at the expense of individualism. And what Huxley doesn't share with us is that the country's leaders get to decide which behaviors are promoted and which are not.

I was very impressed with Huxley's intelligence and insight into human nature, as it is obvious upon reading him one is dealing with a superior mind, but there is a certain tragedy to the man that came through in this book particularly. His own education was, of course, British boarding school with the attendant alienation and estrangement from family and deep love. The character Will Farnaby is, I am certain, patterned after Huxley himself, and is a thoroughly unsympathetic character who exhibits all the traits of a psychopath. This is what he had to say about his girlfriend's attempts at pregnancy:

"He was not much interested in babies and had always been thankful for those repeated miscarriages which had frustrated all Molly's hopes and longings for a child."

The best propaganda buries the lies within a spoonful of sugar and "Island" does just that. It is fitting that Huxley writes himself into this story as an economic hitman because that is what he was in real life too.